Something From Nothing Log

[Ego]

I roll out fifteen trashcans on Tuesdays and have gradually become friends with the guy who digs for cans and bottles. Cory is a lean black guy about my same age. He has an easy smile, a friendly somewhat frantic manner and an erasertop haircut. This week he let me in on his secret.

He always pulls up next to the cans in a fairly nice small pickup truck and tosses the cans and bottles into the bed. Our bins are always overflowing and he organizes them for me in exchange for the exclusive right to dig. Symbiosis. This week we chatted while he was digging and he told me his story.

A few years ago he lost his home when someone (maybe his mother) died and found himself on the streets with absolutely no possessions. So he began to wander, digging through trashcans for anything he could find. After he trash-picked the few things he needed to keep warm, he started collecting recyclables. He learned the various routes and realized that the big hauls were in the bins, like mine, kept behind lock and key.

So he started to use social engineering. He didn't call it that, but that's essentially what he explained. Slowly, over time, he became friends with the people who held the keys. I don't know how he did it with the others, but with me he just kept saying, "Gonna leave it cleaner than when I got here," over and over. And that's what he does. Now I wait for him to arrive before I take out the cans.

In the past two years he went from a shopping cart to a beat up car to his current pickup truck. In that time he also purchased a small motorhome, which he now lives in on the streets down near The Bottoms. He is very proud of the motorhome so I suspect it is pretty nice. He made a point to mention that both are smogged, legally registered and insured.

I asked him how much he makes. He showed me a few receipts from the recycle center and said he makes more than $100 in cash a day, six days a week. He has three rules, no booze, no drugs, no women, and he saves most of what he makes.

Next week I want to ask him about his plans for the future. I'm sure it'll be interesting.

[Ego]

The haul this morning included a Marmot backpack, Patagonia leather ski gloves, several pairs of Lululemon yoga pants, a Katadyn water filter, Chacos sandals, Gore-tex hiking pants, two pairs of REI baselays bottoms, an oil painting for our livingroom (keeper $4) and a 26" touring wheelset with new Continential Gatorskin tires for the touring bike (keeper $30).



We have a bike swap meet coming up in a few weeks. I usually pay for a stall and unload any gear that is even slightly related to cycling or cycle touring. This time I'll have several bikes as well as a few tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads and the leather flight case I mentioned way back when. I used some parts from an old Ortlieb pannier I had scavenged years ago to turn the flight case into a pannier.


Balance: $613.46 - $30 -$4 = $579.46

[7Wannabe5]

@Ego: Your anecdote about the bottle deposit discard market operator was interesting. When I lived in an affluent neighborhood near graduate student housing with high recent immigrant from China population, I often saw an elderly, quite dignified looking Chinese woman digging for bottles. My theory was that she had immigrated with a child, perhaps to help with care of grandchild, didn't speak English, but wanted to keep busy with some kind of work that would earn her a bit of pocket money. I've frequently noted how finding yourself in an entirely alien environment or hitting bottom, as with your friend, can sometimes give people fresh energy or more free rein. It might actually be good for humans to start from scratch again every 7 years or so. Like hard-pruning a tree. When I finish my perma-culture project (goal date 3/1/2022), I might just give it to one of my kids and start again.

[Ego]

I like the way you relate these things to permaculture because it is an area where I have little knowledge and I frequently have a-ha moments. Youtube taught me about the growth spurts produced by hard-pruning a tree.

Why 7?

[JamesR]

it's a reference to http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

[Ego]

Last night I lay in bed starring at the ceiling thinking about how a near-dead tree gets so reinvigorated after a sever pruning that it sprouts thousands of tiny shoots from the remaining limbs and trunk in the same way that new neurons sprout in response to a brain injury. The permaculture guy in the video was saying that he would normally come back in the summer and trim most of the shoots. Hum.

it's a reference to http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

Makes me wonder how many lives (by the way, we call them incarnations ) I would have if I started a new lifetime before reaching mastery. I'm not sure if mastery is even a good goal for me. Maybe good-enough is, well, good-enough for most skills. For the few that I want to master, I can always carry them over into the next incarnation.

[7Wannabe5]

@Ego: You actually already know a lot about permaculture because ERE (the general theory/practice/philosophy as presented in the book) is the same thing. Both could generally be defined as "A Design Methodology Based on Complex System Theory for Creation of Sustainable Human Ecosystems." It's kind of interesting to try to figure out what money actually is in a human ecosystem. Like the title of this thread could also be "Variation Gradient in Value Perception Applied to Manufactured Good End Use." IOW, the "nothing" in your title refers to the value assigned to the object by the person who put it in a dumpster or drop box, and the "something" refers to the value you were able to perceive. However, for example, if you find a bike you perceive to be valuable in a dumpster, and then you sell it to somebody else, and then the bike becomes money in your savings account what has it really become? I mean, money in the bank isn't really like jars of pickles in your cellar or a stack of wood outside your door. So, in the most literal sense you took "something" and turned it into "nothing."

I was thinking about the rule-of-thumb in the cartoon JamesR linked when I picked 7 years. We ENTPs are the "sprinters" or "jumpers" or manically multi-tasking decathlon competitors on the rational team, so even 7 years seems like infinity plus 1 to us, if we can only focus on one realm or objective. If achieving mastery for an INTJ is like following your curiosity up an arduous mountain path until you see something new, an ENTP is more like a puppy that is always running off on loops down every interesting side path, but over the years it still adds up to a lot of territory covered. For instance, I owned a 135-year old house for 12 years and I had no money to spend and my husband had zero interest in home repair/renovation, and then I spent 3 years riding shotgun with my recent-ex who was a landlord/engineer and highly skilled at home repair/renovation, so I am actually probably more competent ( or at least less afraid that something dire will happen if/when I do f*ck up or violate code rather than pay the big bucks to some professional or rush out and buy a lot of new materials and tools) in that realm than most people, even though I think that I suck at it because I am not a master of any one bit of it, and I am not strong enough to manage heavy tools and materials very well by myself, and I am a little bit afraid of heights and have to really psych myself up to climb out on a roof with a bucket of black goo. So, I will probably buy a dilapidated house at auction this fall and attempt again to make "something" out of "nothing" in that realm as part of my permaculture project, although I am still interested in experimenting with the possibility of surviving in a tiny wofati enclosed by my geodesic dome greenhouse through the winter in Michigan, like a little snow-globe biosphere with giant rabbits hopping about, compost slowly burning in abandoned tire towers and fish in barrels of water. However, it is difficult to focus my attention/energies on either of these two projects when the devil (anybody engaged in R.A.S.) is at work just a mile away from me trying to dump radioactive frack waste into one of the last remaining major fresh water supplies on the planet and put mentally impaired dark-skinned children into prison on trumped up charges to be fed and guarded for profit by private corporations, and there are piles of books that I want to read and other things that I want to learn and other things that I want to see. It is possible that I might have to stop eating poppyseed cake from the Polish bakery for breakfast if I want to have enough vigor to do everything that I want to do, although that is not my preference.

[Dragline]

Last night I lay in bed starring at the ceiling thinking about how a near-dead tree gets so reinvigorated after a sever pruning that it sprouts thousands of tiny shoots from the remaining limbs and trunk in the same way that new neurons sprout in response to a brain injury. The permaculture guy in the video was saying that he would normally come back in the summer and trim most of the shoots. Hum.

it's a reference to http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

Makes me wonder how many lives (by the way, we call them incarnations ) I would have if I started a new lifetime before reaching mastery. I'm not sure if mastery is even a good goal for me. Maybe good-enough is, well, good-enough for most skills. For the few that I want to master, I can always carry them over into the next incarnation.

Apparently we can sprout the new neural connections even without the brain injury if we put some effort in on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCptSBUhBvA

[Ego]

So, I will probably buy a dilapidated house at auction this fall and attempt again to make "something" out of "nothing" in that realm as part of my permaculture project, although I am still interested in experimenting with the possibility of surviving in a tiny wofati enclosed by my geodesic dome greenhouse through the winter in Michigan, like a little snow-globe biosphere with giant rabbits hopping about, compost slowly burning in abandoned tire towers and fish in barrels of water.

For the love of God, fix the damn camera already so we can watch it unfold here. Sheesh!

Apparently we can sprout the new neural connections even without the brain injury if we put some effort in on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCptSBUhBvA

Yeah, now that I re-read my post it comes across as strange. In explanation, I've been dealing daily with a guy who suffered a traumatic brain injury and have seen interesting changes that sparked the connection.

[7Wannabe5]

Ego said: For the love of God, fix the damn camera already so we can watch it unfold here. Sheesh!

Well, the bad news is that there were two tragic incidents involving the intersection of heavy winds and my geodesic dome structure recently. The good news is that a different sort of "something from nothing" has occurred in the form of an abundance of competent, masculine vigor making spontaneous, unsolicited appearance at my project site. IOW, variant of the law of nature that always happens when I get a flat on the highway. I have decided that as long as my preferences are honored and nobody tells me to go fetch them a beer, it would be churlish for me to resist.

[Dragline]

If it means anything to you, I am enjoying your efforts with this thread immensely. There is a certain connection with Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power ... _Powerless

It is about creating something good and meaningful by yourself regardless of the society you inhabit. So called "small works" are very important.

[Ego]

@Dragline, Thank you!

While I would love to claim some higher moral or ethical ideal, the truth is much more base. I get a shot of dopamine whenever... to borrow Jacob's permaculture idea.... I close a loop while simultaneously feeding off of it.

I try act ethically and morally in the loop closing. For instance, I do not resort to stealing fat....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNov04_O9Vo

But.... I reluctantly admit the unflattering fact that there is also a slight bonus squirt of dopamine when....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T1MckpC_Gc

Marie Kondo with Soylent Green are somehow mixed in there as well.

[jacob]

@Ego: You actually already know a lot about permaculture because ERE (the general theory/practice/philosophy as presented in the book) is the same thing. Both could generally be defined as "A Design Methodology Based on Complex System Theory for Creation of Sustainable Human Ecosystems."

Off topic, but let me just point out the canon here

They're not the same thing but they do derive from the same thing. General systems theory (applied operations research) is a foundation for both. Permaculture is concerned with semi-static space (where to put this plant in relation this other plant or insect or human, ... ). ERE is concerned with time and probability outcomes (when to do this action(=make a choice) relative to that other action given that this or that happens...). If permaculture is a design methodology, implying the organization of parts, it would be more apt to say that ERE is a strategy methodology, implying the focus on time and probability outcomes.

Both are concerned about increasing efficiency. An efficient natural system is sustainable. For ERE I would say that sustainability is a sufficient but not a required condition for efficiency.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob: Gotcha. I shouldn't have said that they are the same thing. What I should have said, because relevant to this thread, is that there is one example of "success" in permaculture which involves no planting, and this is also one example of "success" in ERE that involves saving no money, and it would be something like a lifestyle totally based on thoughtful, loop-closing, scavenging and foraging or decomposing. Of course, kind of depends on whether a vagrant can be considered to be a free man.

[Ego]

I had another fruitful morning. The only interesting thing is the Singer sewing box I got for $5. I usually buy a dead-grandma box like this each time we come back and use the supplies to repair my inventory. This time I had trouble finding one. Not sure if it is because grandmas no longer keep boxes like these, full of stray buttons, thread, needles, zippers, and a wide variety of problem solvers.



This box even had a Singer Handi-stitch in the bottom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G05dWewvEK4

[Papers of Indenture]

dead grandma box made laugh out loud at desk.

[Ego]

Sometimes I miss the recycle bin at Soylent Towers for the variety of good newspapers. Here I have 40 Millennials (well, a few GenXers too) and not one (NOT ONE!) newspaper reader. Newspapers are DEAD! Tons of glossy magazines, though.

The Millennials are good sharers so I'm thinking of putting a basket in the lobby with a sign encouraging them to leave their old magazines rather than simply tossing them in the recycle bin. Because, you know, I have to dig them out of the bin.

[jacob]

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/i-was-me.html

[anomie]

the in-laws hoarded books and put boxes of books in their $60/mo storage unit prior to departure.
then went on the road and lived out of camper/rv.
they then learned about leave one, take one paperback exchanges that apparently exist in many campgrounds.
the in-laws never went back to get their personal book hoarde.
== free books rule!
&& personal hoarding == waste of time in the long run ??..

[Ego]

A few days after selling the bed I found a used bike on craigslist that was too good to pass up, an REI Novara Safari off road touring bike with a few extra add ons. $100.

Sold the Safari for $325. We could have gotten more but Mrs. Ego and the pixie-like buyer became fast friends. She is preparing for a big bicycle tour. We would have given it to her for free had she asked.

$579.46 + 325 = $904.46